Lord Chang's Meditations on Courting Death
by lithle
Summary: Oneshot in the continuity of SQHRGP. Prequel, can stand alone. Wufei looks back on the night that Duo showed up at his door and considers the reasons he let him in. 2x5.


Title: Talking to Spirits and Courting Death: Lord Chang's Meditations on the Spirit World

Author's Note: As promised, Wufei's thoughts on the night he and Duo first hooked up. Very boring especially without the larger context of SQHRGP but nonetheless can be read alone.

Pairings: 2x5

Disclaimer: As usual, I do not profit from these stories. Though I do get great joy from the lovely feedback some of you take the time to provide.

Whatever it was that existed between myself and Duo began well before the night he showed up on my doorstep. I choose to believe that if I had known then how things would evolve, I would have shut the door in his face. But it is a belief, not a surety. I am given to certain weaknesses. I am not unaware of this.

Duo is always saying that he needs to be around people. He says isolation makes him feel crazed and dangerous. He has said, in the past, that he envies my ability to isolate myself. I have never felt the need to tell him that I am never as alone as I seem.

It was Meiran first, the wife I failed and lost. Her memory, her voice, lingered. The idea of her became a sort of symbol, a separate self. Hers was the voice of my failures, the voice of disapproval and disgust.

And then there was Treize. Enemy. Rival. Idol. To attempt to understand that man, what he did, what he was willing to do, is to stand in shadow. I was the weapon he used to end his life, so I became the vessel of his memory. His became the voice of honor, the voice that reminded me that my actions were fruitless as I could never live up to the shining beacon he had been.

They sang duet, Treize and Meiran. It was a way to allow them life, thinking in the patterns of their silenced voices. I think, on some level, I wished to honor them. That didn't prevent their voices from nearly driving me mad. One can only spend so much time in the company of the dead. If there had been something to do, something to focus on, it might have been different. Work with the Preventers provided little challenge or distraction. I began to miss the war. At least war allowed a man to improve himself, test himself, atone. My sympathies began to fall more and more with the rebels we struggled against and less and less with the peace I was meant to be defending.

It was this torn consciousness that led me toward Duo. I was working on a case, attempting to ferret out the root cause of a number of minor riots on a small mining colony. My investigation was turning up little, stumbling from one avenue of possibility to another without result. My informants were useless. Heero's suggestions were predictably drastic, more likely to increase violence then stem the tide. He could be so damn linear. So unlike, I remembered, Duo.

Undereducated, undisciplined Duo. Duo, who had shown himself, during our few wartime encounters, to be capable of incredible intuitive leaps. His very lack of discipline and logic made him an asset, allowed him to notice what a trained mind missed. It seemed likely that he might be able to see something I couldn't in the reports, and seeking him was preferable to more time spent in the bureaucratic hell of Preventer HQ.

But, by that time, I was already too late. A conversation with Quatre got me as far as Hilde, but he'd parted ways with her over a month before I visited. She clearly had no idea where he'd gone. Her knowledge was limited to the memory of an old acquaintance of Duo's who'd passed through shortly before he'd left. I visited Howard. Nothing. L2. Nothing. Not even a whisper of his presence. He was gone.

I managed to resolve the riot issue. Closing the file should have ended the search. I kept looking. At first the reason seemed simple. It was appropriate for the Preventers to have some knowledge of where someone as potentially dangerous as Duo was. It was a good justification, regardless of truth. My demons mocked my need for obsessions, but with my attention shifted elsewhere, they grew less vocal. I was too caught up in thoughts of the hunt to listen to ghosts. I studied Duo, tried to guess what might have driven him to hiding. I got Howard drunk. I watched clips of Duo and Deathscythe from the war, those broadcast on the news and those that Shenlong's system had automatically captured. And I got nowhere. I had no context for Duo, no way in.

I was nothing if not thorough. I memorized every clip, heard every word he'd ever spoken that technology had captured. You can only listen to someone's voice so many times before the sound of it fails to fade. Cadences, colloquialisms, patterns, they burnt their way in, and another voice joined my greek chorus. Or it would have, if its words had not been so opposed to the established order. Duo's was the voice that belittled its own existence; he mocked my anger and teased over honor. If I had used the memory of Treize and Meiran as the hammer and anvil that forged the blade of my existence, then Duo's voice was the water that cooled and quenched, that named the process ended. Put simply, he kept me sane. I walked the knife's edge, still. Warriors do. But my more treasonous thoughts eased in intensity and lessened in duration. I kept looking for him. It was something to do.

And then he was on my doorstep. The vids didn't do him justice but were also kinder then the reality. They hadn't captured his energy, his presence. They'd also shown him younger. He'd gained height since the war, but not weight. His frame, which had once displayed a warrior's lean lines, was now clearly underweight. Still, his stance was a fighter's and his eyes were as bright as I remembered. Brighter, they were almost feverish in their intensity as he did what we all did and searched over my shoulder for obstacles, weapons, exits.

"Wufei." He played my name out; let it linger on his tongue like something sweet. "I was in the neighborhood. Thought maybe I'd borrow a cup of sugar."

"You look like hell, Maxwell. Get in here." I stepped aside and he rushed past me as if worried that the offer would soon be rescinded.

It wasn't as odd as it should have been, having the object of six months of searching standing in my living room. I had become so accustom to the company of his voice that the reality of his presence felt almost natural. But he wasn't my memories of him. I only had to see him smile to know that he was sharper, darker, and less stable. Maybe he'd changed. Maybe memory and video were incapable of capturing such qualities.

"Don't pay you very well, do they?" Duo asked as he examined my sparse furnishings.

I began to do what felt natural, ignoring him as I went to the kitchen and threw together a plate of leftovers. But I could still see him over the bar and his voice in my head was quick to scold me for attitude. It thought I needed more friends. Or, a friend. Something more than echoes of people dead or, as the moment proved, not quite so dead.

So I handed him the plate and said, "I have enough to see to my needs."

He settled on the couch, but barely. Perched at the edge of the cushions he radiated energy. It wasn't that he fidgeted, he didn't need to. Being near him was like standing beside a live explosive. There was a sense that any moment time would run out and he'd send shrapnel whizzing through my living room, leave scorch marks on the cushions.

I watched him eat. He watched me watch him. It wasn't difficult to narrow down the likely reasons for his visit. He shifted toward me each time I moved and his attention followed me with all the focus our kind usually only gave to our targets. So, either he'd come to kill me, or his intentions ran in a second, equally interesting direction. Regardless, judging by the way he sat, muscles tense as tripwires, the night wasn't likely to end without some blood being shed.

When you exist on the knife's edge, always holding on to the barest vestiges of control, it's easy to recognize someone else in the same condition. His voice had steadied me on that edge. Looking at him I knew if I couldn't offer him catharsis, something to break or break against, my memory of his voice would be all that was left of him.

"So. Chang Wufei, servant of the great peace. You enjoying life as a Preventer?" The disgust in his words was so thick it might have been me talking.

"The Preventers are cowards who tell themselves that filing paperwork is the same as fighting an injustice." I replied, voicing thoughts I was often at the verge of shouting each morning as I entered work.

"Heh. Don't be so hard on yourself." He sent the words out like a spray of bullets.

"Maxwell, if I believed there to be some better way to protect what we fought for—"

"You never were a very creative thinker."

We each have our skills, but I believe Duo is the only one of our number capable of driving a man to a killing rage with words alone. If he'd arrived at my doorstep six months earlier, I might have strangled him. Six months earlier, and the next two years would have never happened. And I would have snapped, but it would have been a simple thing. Heero would have killed me, and the whole situation would have been resolved.

As it was, his attacks were more amusing then irritating, and after a few more attempts to get a rise out of me, he began to actually listen. He's not a bad listener, when he wants something. Anyway, I hadn't had an actual conversation since before my involvement in the war, so my standards weren't particularly high.

We talked. I talked. He listened, and made it clear that he was listening with the occasional irreverent but not unintelligent interjection. Somewhere in the night, he seemed to lose track of his original intent. His attention lost its predatory edge and I worried I'd overplayed my hand until he showed no sign of leaving. Around three in the morning I brought up the case that had first set me looking for him. He listened, then interrupted half way through my explanation to point out the exact detail that we'd spent so much time missing. My original impulse (if not my subsequent obsession) vindicated, I listened with surprise to the abrupt silence of my disarmed ghosts.

Duo watched me with open hesitation. I think I may have been smiling.

I said, "This isn't why you came here, though."

His eyes widened briefly, then narrowed with understanding. His smile did not lack an edge.

It was very simple, that night. What he needed, what I wanted. He left at sunrise, the dim light gilding his sharp, angular form. I thought that was the end of it. Most nights now, I fall asleep to a chorus of ghosts and wake knotted with desire, his name like a benediction on my lips. And I wish it had been. I wish he'd never come back.


End file.
